Product reliability
To assess product reliability, we asked respondents to tell us how well products met their service expectations. We didn't ask about specific uptime numbers because many organizations don't produce metrics with this level of precision on a subsystem basis. Instead, we asked whether the product met service level requirements, their downtime perceptions, frequency of required patches and the level of disruption caused by product fixes.
"The products and feature sets themselves have delivered as promised," notes National City Bank's Bottger of his firm's IBM and HDS arrays.
This was the only category in which a vendor exceeded an overall score of 6.0--HDS received a 6.14 (see "Product reliability," this page). HP, IBM and EMC all scored above 5.50--a very good score. Sun had a respectable 5.41, but the surprise was that Sun didn't track with HDS and HP given the near-identical hardware. Sun's score was pulled down by a 5.0 rating for the question: "This vendor offers comprehensive upgrade guidance." Thus, inadequate upgrade guidance and resulting problems could result in missing some service level requirements that may be unrelated to the product itself.
